Summer Quarter 2007 - Week 7: The Transformation of Death

My guest Blogger this week is Mike Owen. Mike is my mentor, dear friend and example of the kind of man I strive to be. We have "grown-up" together through many dangerous adventures. He wrote to me earlier this week - I've edited his missive a little and find the philosophy of Paul Tillich to be intriguing.

On first approach it may seem that Tillich's views of God are atheistic (see the final lines of Mike's post) - on deeper consideration - it seems to me that Tillich is simply challenging the pablum of modern religious sophists who eschew truth in favor of universal acceptance. The free gift of immortality notwithstanding.

What stands out to me in Mike's entry is this phrase from Paul Tillich - whose writings Mike is currently reading in pursuit of his degree.

“The dead are not allowed to show that they are dead; they are transformed into a mask of the living.” Paul Tillich

This idea has implications for REQUIEM. Indeed, how do we keep the dead from showing they are dead? By keeping their memory alive? By remembering them? And how does a man - like the Old Man -wear the mask of the dead? I don't know the answers. But I think the Old Man does.

Mike Owen writes:

…the B&W look of your latest... the grain and sharpness reminds me of the look from a Leica M lens. These are such great lenses they withstand most of the harsh flare that will ruin a photo when pointing into the sun.

Have you read any Tillich (Paul Tillich) yet: The Courage To Be? There are actually two dynamic tensions according to Tillich: fate at tension with death; guilt and condemnation at tension with meaninglessness. (Some of Tillich’s) passage(s) came to mind as I looked at your latest blog:

(These) are (the) two ontological questions facing humans; the courage to be an individual and the courage to be as a part of a collective. The bipolar ‘poles’ of each of these questions are: fate and death. Fate talks about my potential and whether or how I’m doing right now, in my life to
accomplish my task. Death is the other half of this anxiety. As death marks the end of time in this plane in which I’m supposed to find and complete my mission.

According to Tillich, Americans have a unique form of this human struggle. He writes speaking of the American ideas of production and manifest destiny as the way we participate in the collective: (He wrote this in the 1950’s)

“The anxiety conquered in the courage to be as a part is considerable, because the threat of being excluded from such a participation by unemployment or the loss of an economic basis is
what, above all, fate means today.”

“Only in the light of this situation can the tremendous impact of the great crisis of the 1930’s on the American people (Tillich was from Germany), and the frequent loss of the courage to be in it, be understood.

"The anxiety about death is met in two ways. The reality of death is excluded from daily life to the highest possible degree. The dead are not allowed to show that they are dead; they are transformed into a mask of the living. The other and more important way of dealing with death is the belief in a continuation of life after death, called
immortality of the soul. This is not Christian and hardly a Platonic doctrine. Christianity speaks of resurrection and eternal life - Platonism of a participation of the soul in the trans-temporal sphere of essences. But the modern idea of immortality means a continuous participation in the productive process- “time world without end.”

“It is not the eternal rest of the individual in God but his unlimited contribution to the dynamics of the universe that gives him the courage to face death. In this kind of hope God is almost unnecessary. He may be considered as the guarantor of immortality, but if not, the belief in immortality is not shaken. For the courage to be as a part of the productive process, immortality is decisive and not God, except that God is understood as the productive process itself as with some theologians.”